Quotes of the day

posted at 8:01 pm on July 13, 2014 by Allahpundit

Until now, the politics of immigration have been seen as a no-lose proposition for President Obama and the Democrats. If they could get a comprehensive overhaul passed, they would win. And if Republicans blocked it, the GOP would further alienate crucial Hispanic and moderate voters.

But with the current crisis on the Southwest border, where authorities have apprehended tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children since October, that calculus may be shifting.

Republicans and even some Democrats have accused Obama of being insufficiently engaged in a calamity that many say he should have seen coming…

The emergency has also renewed questions about the administration’s competence, reminiscent of those raised during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, last year’s botched rollout of the health-care law and more recent revelations of mismanagement that jeopardized care of patients at veterans hospitals.

***

According to Brian Bennett’s intensely reported July 5 Los Angeles Times story, U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show that officers took fewer than 4,000 unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into custody annually for most of the last decade. Then, in fiscal year 2012, officers seized 10,146 unaccompanied minors. Last fiscal year, they took 20,805; between last October and this June 15, they nabbed 39,133. The overused word “crisis” fits the numbers—indeed, “invasion” doesn’t seem too strong. By July 8, however, the White House had downgraded the invasion from a “crisis” to a “situation.”

Many Americans are deeply disturbed by the “situation.” They resent the expenditure of resources and the appropriation of facilities for the detention of the minors. They fear the public health consequences of their dispersion, with reports reliably indicating, despite attempts to suppress the information, the presence of tuberculosis and other unwelcome conditions among them. They also suspect that the president of the United States supports the situation.

Conditions have not suddenly changed in the minors’ home countries. So far as we can tell, the cartels and their customers have a sophisticated understanding of American immigration law (it prohibits the immediate deportation of minors “other than Mexican”) and how the White House enforces it (President Obama, as he made clear in a 2012 executive order regarding illegal minors, would prefer not to). As a Cleveland immigration attorney told Bennett, “The cartels have figured out where the hole is.”

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican whose state is housing 1,100 immigrant children at Fort Sill – just 100 shy of total capacity – said she’s still grasping at the scope of the problem and worried about the conditions the children now face.

“We had one case of chicken pox. We’ve had many cases of scabies and lice,” Fallin said.

She added that there’s been no guidance about how long the children will be housed, whether they’re entitled to any taxpayer-funded benefits, from education to Medicaid to foster care. And she’s unsure whether they might be “let loose in the United States” once they turn 18.

***

Illegal immigrants are being secretly flown to Massachusetts and kept in local lockups in an under-the-radar operation that has alarmed lawmen who are raising health and security concerns amid recent spikes in detainees coming up from Texas during the latest border crisis.

Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, said federal officials also wouldn’t answer questions about public school attendance by the children and the potential costs to taxpayers.

“Governors and mayors have the right to know when the federal government is transporting a large group of individuals, in this case illegal immigrants, into your state,” Mr. Heineman told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Saturday. “We need to know who they are, and so far, they are saying they’re not going to give us that information.”…

“There are concerns that this type of activity—placing children in locations across the country—is occurring throughout the United States, and information is not being shared appropriately with states,” the Republican Governors Association policy director, Marie Thomas Sanderson, wrote in an email to members on Friday and viewed by the Journal.

The pregnant minors have been moved into longer-term shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services in order to provide federally funded health care…

Under the 14th Amendment their children will be American citizens if they are born in the United States. It is unclear whether the mothers — and their children — will be deported. Wolfe did not respond to multiple requests for comment on that issue, and White House spokesman Josh Earnest did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.

HHS is trying to release the children to sponsors in the United States, but those sponsors aren’t always parents. “There have been cases of people who have attempted to be sponsors actually being identified as associated with trafficking organizations,” Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla) told National Review Online after visiting a housing facility at Fort Sill…

“If you can’t pay your coyote or your criminal organization, they will force you into slave labor or they will force you into prostitution,” the congressman said. And of the children who did make it to American custody, “a significant percentage of the children in these facilities have been abused, in one way or another, coming to the United States,” according to Bridenstine.

Sometimes fraud is remarkably obvious. Latham says any child that plans to attend Lynn Public Schools must make an appointment with the Parent Information Center and provide identification and residency information in order to be accepted and placed into one of the public schools.

In one instance, an unaccompanied alien minor brought a warrant for his arrest to the center and provided it to center officials.

“This situation just happens to be a magnitude unlike anything we have ever seen,” said Lauren Alder Reid, counsel for legislative and public affairs at the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the courts.

Immigration courts in the United States have long been troubled. The courts, overseen by the Department of Justice, have more than 375,000 cases being handled by just 243 judges, according to the agency…

“The system is so dysfunctional,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. “They get to stay, and the more time they spend here, the more difficult it is to get them removed.”

“So make no mistake about it — we have to keep on fighting as hard as we can on immigration,” Mrs. Obama said, to a cheering crowd, Breitbart reported. “And as my husband has said, he’s going to do whatever administrative action it takes to fix this broken system.”…

“We cannot afford to wait on Congress to lift up our next generation,” she said, Breitbart reported. “We can’t afford to wait on anybody when it comes to our kids’ future. Your grandparents and parents didn’t wait for opportunities to come to them. No, they packed up their families and moved to this country for a better life.”

***

Immigration from nearby countries — and, to some extent, all modern immigration — presents absorption problems that were not present with, say, European immigrants in the late 18th and early 19th century. To have a few unassimilated ethnic and linguistic minorities is normal in a large, modern country. But it is one thing to have a couple of Ukrainian churches in Philadelphia or a handful of German-speaking communities in Texas. It is another thing to have a socio-linguistic Berlin Wall or three running through practically every community in the country. Adjacency to Mexico, along with easier travel and communication, makes assimilating Mexican immigrants more difficult than assimilating the Irish generations ago. This is not at all helped by opportunistic political entrepreneurs such as La Raza and MEChA, which cultivate racial sentiment and separatism within Hispanic communities. Some parts of the country, such as my native West Texas, have long been Anglo-Hispanic cultural hybrids, and that can be a wonderful thing. It is not necessarily a good model for the country at large.

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I know that. My point is: why isn’t this a huge issue in the news? Why are the Republicans ignoring it?
Fenris on July 14, 2014 at 12:02 AM

That’s an easy one, Fenris–Dear Senator Ted “Wacko Bird” Cruz is leading the charge against it, including TWICE bringing up IN COMMITTEE the ORIGINAL wording of the First Amendment…in the nature of a substitute of the socialists’ proposal.

Could be, but never saw a drone that big or emitting those colors, silently.

But you never know. What the heck would the gov’t want with my ticks and weeds though?

Diluculo on July 13, 2014 at 11:45 PM

When I was working at Vanguard Space Systems, I used to do DARPA Black Project stuff. It wasn’t your ticks and weeds they wanted. You would be surprised at how difficult it is getting to fly Black Project stuff without unintended eyes seeing it. Especially when the Black Project stuff is infested with sensor telemetry stuff designed for electronic eavesdropping. My understanding is that current cutting edge sensor telemetry has about a 5 mile radius.

That means from 5 miles away they can reliably zoom in on an individual, and specifically tap any electronic communications emanating from their target. And by tap, I mean turn your cell phone on and use it as a listening device, access all of it’s data, even turn the camera on, not that it does much good if it’s in your pocket. But anything the phone can do, they can access. That also goes for any computer or lap top as well.

Add to that all of the standard thermal and optical imaging, yada yada yada, you get the picture. It pretty difficult to test electronic information intercept equipment out over the pacific ocean if ya get my drift.

I know that. My point is: why isn’t this a huge issue in the news? Why are the Republicans ignoring it?
Fenris on July 14, 2014 at 12:02 AM

That’s an easy one, Fenris–Dear Senator Ted “Wacko Bird” Cruz is leading the charge against it, including TWICE bringing up IN COMMITTEE the ORIGINAL wording of the First Amendment…in the nature of a substitute of the socialists’ proposal.Newtie and the Beauty on July 14, 2014 at 12:04 AM

I almost forgot–the socialists have voted down the proposed Cruz amendment TWICE.

You know what you could do to begin the arduous task of going to heaven? You could go get Sophie before the night’s over. Next week is going to be different, and I’m sweating like an alcoholic now finally out of cigarettes, too.

I actually got turned on by a vacuum cleaner commercial yesterday, and I’m not even sure why.

Some see a bucket…and some have called a knight’s helm a bucket, too… I see a noble helm, Paladin. :)

thatsafactjack on July 14, 2014 at 12:07 AM

I’ve never ever thought of it this way–nor did I think of it when I saw it–only when you made that comment, but this weekend we went to see the Magna Carta exhibit and there was a replica of a knight’s helmet of the time. The top was flat–just like a bucket with slits for eyes. Sort of like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_helm

I don’t think I’ll ever see that style again w/o thinking of buckets. LOL

Hey, Jackie! Oh, no, don’t be. I got a laugh out of it. For all I know the original design may have been modeled on a bucket. I can see the humor, utilitarian, and seriousness of that and this all at once.

“Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart.”
–C. S. Lewis on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

I thought of this quote after reading the earlier discussion of the finite number of stories and music. There may be a limited number, but the ones you remember and that touch your heart and mind are the ones that bring into sharpest focus and reflect with the greatest brilliance truth who we are and the world in which we live.

LOTS is an example of a quest story. There are lots of quest stories with themes of good and evil, perseverance against all odds, betrayal of trust and faithful friends. The ones we remember are the ones that strike deep into our heart. And that comes not only with the skill of the author or in the case of music, the composer, but with the depth of insight and understanding each has.

<–Mostly lurking and attempting to realign meaning and value of now otherwise unprizable ambitions and goals, their startling valuelessness having made them, in this strange interim, insurmountable as tasks. The shocking amount of work weighed against the reward of nothing but billions of dollars has, in this interim, daunted my will completely — yet I have to continue, the ambitions having no longer any value in themselves, but still having great value in the context they provide — and I have to get this clear in my head even as I put my hand back around the axe, or I will have no strength to swing it.

2011 was such a missed opportunity. Read lots of your stuff. YOU must write as a vocation. It’s a friendly order :)

Schadenfreude on July 14, 2014 at 1:18 AM

Love to… who’s hiring?

Funny thing is, I’m a much better actor than a writer… I was scared to pursue a career in acting, when there was ready money in photography (my first career). I honestly think I could have been on the silver screen, and that is probably my greatest regret in life.